It’s long and sad, but I just needed to write this:

I don’t often have days where I can’t keep it together. Today has been one of those days. This morning I found out that a friend’s seven-year-old son passed away. I didn’t expect it to shake me quite the way it has. There has been a lot of death surrounding me lately—on the outskirts—like a shadow that doesn’t quite enter your vision. Two friends have lost their fathers unexpectedly in the last week. It makes you think about mortality and your own parents. It seems the number of people I know with cancer keeps getting higher. I know things about treatment and illness that I rather I was ignorant to, for the reason that I would not know someone with first-hand experience.
I cannot claim these friends that lost their son were close friends of mine, but in a way that only social media can do, they felt more intimate through their numerous blog posts. I met them in Iowa, but they were often in New York for his treatment. Their little boy was a trooper with a loveable personality that accepted cancer as a way of life—he knew nothing else having been diagnosed at three.  It seems not that long ago that he sat in my apartment, spitting a grape back into the bowl of fruit salad to his parents’ horror and my laughter, declaring “I don’t really like grapes!”
I walked through Central Park with his mom, listening to her go through things she might have done differently while pregnant with him…something that might have prevented this terrible disease. Today I keep thinking about the bravery of every parent out there and what fear must consume you at times. There is no way to completely protect your child and how terrifying that must be. A part of me wants to retreat—isn’t it easier to not open yourself to such possible pain? But surely the reward is great. But more than anything I just ache… my heart is so very heavy for my friends. Their precious child is gone and I cannot imagine the loss—the empty void—they must feel. The desire to hold in their arms someone who is no longer there. Tears run down my face as I write this and I can’t help feeling a bit angry that life just isn’t all that fair. I get caught up in such petty problems and stress over things that don’t matter, but today I’m reminded of how much I have to be thankful for and how precious are those around me. What I would give to see that boy with his endearing smile in my apartment now, spitting another grape into my fruit salad.